Over Your Dead Mother: Rumors and Secrets in Stifter's "Tourmaline"

Nicola Behrmann, Anders Dickson

Abstract

Despite his confidence that he could create a simple and lucid masterpiece of descriptive narration, Adalbert Stifter’s “Tourmaline” turned out to be the most obscure and complex tale in his story-collection Many-Colored Stones (1852). This essay traces the cryptological drive undermining the coherence and closure the realist narrator attempts to provide. Stifter’s abundant description of seemingly superfluous details, the numerous narrative gaps and various rumors confuse any sufficient account of what really happened. The breaks and leaks in storytelling can be understood as indices leading to a submerged work of mourning. The pedagogical intention organizing Stifter’s meticulous story-telling not only in this story turns upon itself through the incessant supply of these commemorative indices or fragments. Not only is such pedagogy unable to find an efficient narrative mode, it also consistently undermines the authority whereby the instructor-narrator might come to terms with his own tale.